The reading in law school is relentless. You’re staring down 50, 60, sometimes 80 pages per class, and that’s before you factor in supplements, outlines, and everything else competing for your attention. The students who succeed aren’t necessarily reading every single word—they’re reading strategically.
Here’s what actually works.
Start with the Syllabus
Your professor handed you a roadmap on day one. Use it. Look at what topics are coming up and how much class time is devoted to each. If your Contracts professor is spending three full classes on consideration, you know that’s going to matter. If there’s a single case that gets an entire class period, that case deserves more than a quick skim.
The syllabus also tells you when major assignments are due and when exams are scheduled. This isn’t just administrative information—it’s strategic intelligence. You can adjust your reading intensity based on what’s ahead. Week before a memo is due? You might need to dial back the Civ Pro deep-dive.
Not All Law School Reading Is Created Equal
Some cases are foundational. They establish black letter law, they get cited constantly, they’re the building blocks for everything that comes after. These cases deserve your full attention. Read them carefully. Brief them thoroughly. Understand not just what happened, but why the court ruled the way it did.
Other cases are there to illustrate exceptions, show how courts have applied a rule in specific contexts, or demonstrate how the law has evolved. These cases matter, but they don’t require the same level of scrutiny. You need to understand how they fit into the bigger picture, but you don’t need to memorize every procedural detail.
How do you tell the difference? Your casebook usually gives you clues. Cases that appear first in a section are typically the foundational ones. Cases that come later often build on or complicate what came before. The headnotes and introductory text from your casebook editor will often signal which cases are the heavy hitters.
How to Read Law School Cases Efficiently
Your first read-through should be about understanding what happened. Who are the parties? What’s the dispute? What did the lower court do? What did this court decide?
Your second pass is about understanding why it matters. What’s the legal issue? What rule does the court announce or apply? What’s the court’s reasoning? This is where you start thinking about how this case connects to other cases you’ve read and where it might show up on an exam.
You don’t always need multiple full read-throughs. Sometimes your first pass is enough. But for complex cases or foundational opinions, that second look is where the real learning happens.
Strategic Skimming: What to Read Closely and What to Skim
Some parts of cases simply matter more than others. Procedural history is important, but unless you’re in Civil Procedure and the case is specifically about procedural issues, you don’t need to memorize every motion and appeal. Long recitations of facts that aren’t central to the legal issue can be skimmed. Concurrences and dissents are often worth reading, but if you’re short on time, focus on the majority opinion first.
The court’s statement of the issue and its holding are gold. The reasoning section is where you figure out how the court got from point A to point B. These sections deserve your careful attention.
Many students waste time on tangential discussions or dicta—things the court mentions but that aren’t central to its decision. Learn to recognize when a court is making an essential point versus when it’s just musing about hypotheticals or alternative scenarios.
Case Briefing: When to Do It and When to Stop
There’s a debate about whether you should brief every case. Early in your first semester, briefing is valuable. It forces you to identify the key components of a case and organize your thoughts. It’s training wheels for your legal analysis skills.
But briefing every case for the entire year is probably overkill. As you get more comfortable, you’ll be able to identify the important parts of a case without writing it all down. You might switch to book briefing—using highlighting and margin notes instead of separate case briefs. Or you might brief only the major cases and take shorter notes on the others.
The point of briefing isn’t to create a beautiful document. It’s to process the case and prepare yourself to discuss it in class and use it later when you’re studying for exams. Once you can do that without the formal brief, you’ve outgrown the training wheels.
The 10-Minute Review Before Class
You read the cases, maybe you briefed them, and now it’s the night before class or the morning of class. Don’t just show up. Spend ten minutes reviewing what you read. Flip back through your briefs or your annotations. Remind yourself of the key cases and how they connect to each other.
This quick review makes an enormous difference. You’ll be able to follow class discussion more easily, you’ll catch references to earlier cases, and you’ll retain the information better. The students who look like they have everything together in class? They’re probably doing this.
Using Class Time to Clarify and Prioritize
Class isn’t just about avoiding getting cold-called. It’s your chance to see how all these cases fit together. Your professor is connecting the dots, showing you the bigger picture, and explaining what you really need to know.
Take good notes about what your professor emphasizes. If they spend twenty minutes on a particular aspect of a case you barely noticed, that’s important. If they keep coming back to a certain rule or principle, that’s going to show up again—probably on the exam.
Also pay attention to hypotheticals. Professors use hypotheticals to test the boundaries of legal rules and to show you how to apply what you’ve learned. These hypotheticals are often exam questions in disguise.
After Class: Synthesizing Cases and Building Your Outline
The reading doesn’t end when class is over. After each class, spend a little time consolidating your notes. Add anything from class discussion to your briefs. Make sure you understand how the cases you read fit together and how they relate to the overall topic.
This is also when you should start thinking about your outline. You don’t need to write a full outline after every class, but you should be building it gradually. Add the new rule you learned, note how it differs from or builds on previous rules, and include examples from the cases.
Students who wait until right before exams to make their outlines are doing it wrong. By then, everything’s a blur and you’re just scrambling to remember what happened in week three. Build your understanding as you go.
Finding a Reading Routine That Actually Works
Some students read better in the morning. Others focus better late at night. Some people need absolute silence while others work well in coffee shops. There’s no single right way to do this.
What matters is that you’re consistent and that you’re honest with yourself about what works. If you keep telling yourself you’ll read at the library after your 4PM class but you never actually do it, stop lying to yourself. Find a different time or a different place.
Reading for law school isn’t about reading more—it’s about reading smarter. Understand what you’re reading, know why it matters, and connect it to everything else you’re learning. The students who drown in the reading are usually the ones who treat every page the same and every case as equally important.
Be strategic. Be consistent. Be honest about what you understand and what you don’t. And remember that everyone else in your section is dealing with the same avalanche of cases you are. The ones who seem to have it all figured out? They’re just reading smarter.
Check out CEB’s Student Resource Center where you can find more information on navigating law school and transitioning to practice in California.
